I can see you edited out your reply while I was writing mine, so I'll do the same.

As for the topic, I always saw Duke3D as a natural extension of where Doom itself was going even if it was a little inconsistent with its tone. Dark, atmospheric music and gloomy setting. Pigs with shotguns? One-liners? Overly camp cutscenes? Does that reduce to tonal z-fighting or does it create a sharp edge that defines much of the charm of the game? I don't know. You could get away with a lot more back then I guess.

I recently had some duke3d coop with a friend. We played through episode 1 and 2. Especially 2 had some amazing level design. It certainly isn't linear. Got lost several times, but I'm one of those freaks who actually enjoy that. I did notice how glitchy everything is, but I never expected it to be as "bad" as shown in that video :D

DooM_RO said:
I was comparing it with Doom 2. There's a difference. And it's not linear at all.

Doom2 is better than Doom in every aspect except novelty and your desperate crusade against it in a thread dealing with Build being a buggy engine is just making me agree with phml. I'm sorry that the game didn't fulfill your hopes of a Quake-come-1994, but I don't even get the message you are trying to convey. DN3D oneupped Doom in some sense? You don't say. All of the copycats had to bring something new to the table, otherwise they wouldn't get any serious attention. Duke3D certainly doesn't feel as THAT much of a leap forward when compared to Dark Forces or Marathon (EDIT: or fucking DESCENT!!! EDIT2: Or how about some System Shock? That's far more interactive than DN3D, huh?! HUH?!), games that came before it.

In many ways it's the true sequel to Doom, especially E2.

I like Duke3D, it's a really cool and (in its time) innovative game, but when you say stuff like that, I get a feeling you're just lashing out because of some personal bias. Did Doomguy beat you at school?

The thing about Duke 3D that really lowered it a couple of notches for me wasn't the sexism, babe-rescuing plot or toilet-pissing (though they played their part), it was that the enemies didn't really hang together in my mind as a cohesive force. OK, so most of them were quite lizardy in appearance but the pig cops and general feel of the enemies was too random and silly to me. So, I didn't really enjoy fighting them that much. I couldn't even work out what the main trooper enemy was really supposed to look like until I saw some hi-res concept art.

OK, the Doom enemies are also a bit of a random collection but somehow the premise of them being hellish and with there being a reasonably consistent approach to appearance and integration of human tech (where it is used) meant that I didn't get the same feeling about them.

Basically, I thought the Duke enemies were a bit random and silly but the Doom ones were less so.

Actually, I find the monsters in Duke very cohesive. They all share similar traits, sans pig-cop, of course. They are all flesh colored with stripes, tailed, and reptile-like in appearance. They are believable as a species. Of course the mutant creatures (pig-cops, octobrains, and slimers) deviates from this theme.

EDIT: Also, has any photos of the armatures used for the sprites turn up? I know some third party bought them and has since hoarded them.

dew said:
Doom2 is better than Doom in every aspect except novelty and your desperate crusade against it in a thread dealing with Build being a buggy engine is just making me agree with phml. I'm sorry that the game didn't fulfill your hopes of a Quake-come-1994, but I don't even get the message you are trying to convey. DN3D oneupped Doom in some sense? You don't say. All of the copycats had to bring something new to the table, otherwise they wouldn't get any serious attention. Duke3D certainly doesn't feel as THAT much of a leap forward when compared to Dark Forces or Marathon (EDIT: or fucking DESCENT!!! EDIT2: Or how about some System Shock? That's far more interactive than DN3D, huh?! HUH?!), games that came before it.

I like Duke3D, it's a really cool and (in its time) innovative game, but when you say stuff like that, I get a feeling you're just lashing out because of some personal bias. Did Doomguy beat you at school?

You still don't get it, I was talking about Doom 2, which I like but much less than Doom 1. The interactivity and the still abstract but more believable level design (different to realism) is what made it for me . Even when I was 8 my friend and I called the shareware Doom "the cool Doom" because it looked cooler. I vaguely remember playing the other games you mentioned when I was little so I'll have to fire them up again but since we're talking System Shock, I play its sequel at least once a year. Oh, and Quake is good but not really my style. I can see why people like it though.

I don't know, maybe all the mods like Demon Eclipse have altered my expectations. I love everything in it, more specifically how the weapons looked and acted differently each episode without becoming gimmicky, overpowered or un-doomlike and how awesome the combination of Doom/Heretic/Hexen atmosphere of E2 is - especially the levels in the newer version.

Looper said:
Duke 3D slow? How about steroids + straferunning :D that's the only way to play it anyways ":D"

Yeah, the Duke3D engine is REALLY fucked up. It's full of glitches, they are literally everywhere (that's good for us speedrunners though!).

LLCoolDave is one of the best Duke3D speedrunners around. The most impressive thing about the run on the video is that it's single segmented; I still hold most of the "official" (Speed Demos Archive) world records for Vanilla Duke3D, but my runs are not single segmented.

XBLA world records are really mindblowing, though those must be consdered as TAS's rather than regular speedruns, as the XBOX360 version of the game allows the use of savestates.

On the topic of the AGDQ 2014 Duke Nukem 3D speedrun, what really ought to be brought up by now is that the now-famous E1L3-skipping bug only works on the Megaton Edition, which was the version used in this run. It doesn't appear to work in the original game, which seems to handle the help screen properly. In other words, it's a bug in the modern version of the game instead of a bug in the original.

I was, however, able to do the whole glitch exhibition in the original game, including the bug that destroys the E4L1 conference room. ;)

The Green Herring said:
Back on the topic of the AGDQ 2014 Duke Nukem 3D speedrun, what really ought to be brought up by now is that the now-famous E1L3-skipping bug only works on the Megaton Edition, which was the version used in this run. It doesn't appear to work in the original game, which seems to handle the help screen properly. In other words, it's a bug in the modern version of the game instead of a bug in the original.

I was, however, able to do the whole glitch exhibition in the original game, including the bug that destroys the E4L1 conference room. ;)

Not only that one, but also many others in that run, like, for instance, the E3L1 door skip almost at the end of the level; I'm pretty sure that one is not possible in Vanilla Duke3D (one of the requirements for submitting speedruns to SDA was that it's mandatory to use the original version of the game to record the runs).

In my attempts to get as high as possible in the XBLA leader boards (By just playing the game on higher difficulties with an emphasis on killing as much aliens as possible) for this game, I found myself being killed by:

The vanilla engine should be a requirement for speed runs, IMO. If not, I can modify the engine to accommodate a faster run. Hey, if they encourage you to use whatever version gets you the fastest run, why not?

Creaphis
I will deliberately take a contrary position just for the sake of writing incredibly long arguments

Posts: 4185
Registered: 10-05

Fernito said:
Is that so? Then I don't know why in our case some guy who was in charge (radix, if I recall correctly?) made us use the original DOS Duke3D executable to record the runs (no ports allowed).

Well, third-party source ports aren't allowed, but when a game has multiple "official" versions I believe that they're all acceptable. Of course, there are cases where version differences are significant enough for records to be tracked separately, and there are games where a mod de facto becomes official, and there are times when you can use emulators and times you can't, and etc., so getting clarification from somebody who knows what they're talking about is a good idea.

Creaphis said:
Well, third-party source ports aren't allowed, but when a game has multiple "official" versions I believe that they're all acceptable. Of course, there are cases where version differences are significant enough for records to be tracked separately, and there are games where a mod de facto becomes official, and there are times when you can use emulators and times you can't, and etc., so getting clarification from somebody who knows what they're talking about is a good idea.

Sounds logical.

Anyway, take into consideration that my runs were published in 2007, so maybe SDA rules were stricter back then?

Technician said:
The vanilla engine should be a requirement for speed runs, IMO. If not, I can modify the engine to accommodate a faster run. Hey, if they encourage you to use whatever version gets you the fastest run, why not?

The Green Herring said:
the now-famous E1L3-skipping bug only works on the Megaton Edition, which was the version used in this run. ... I was, however, able to do the whole glitch exhibition in the original game, including the bug that destroys the E4L1 conference room.

This makes me wonder, how many of these bugs are in Build proper, and how many are the DN3D team's fault? Remember, Build isn't a complete game the way Doom is; it's a 3D engine with some niceties, but when Ken Silverman licensed it commercially it was as a binary library to link and build upon. That's why each Build game has its own features, like DN3D's scripting, Shadow Warrior's ceiling/floor portals, or Blood's doomfy data encryption.

I've watched speed-runs of Shadow Warrior (both the original game and the Redux re-release and, while there're some hilarious shortcuts (mostly involving jumping on top of enemies!), it's nowhere near as much of a clipping-glitchfest as LLCoolDave's DN3D run. Is it really "the bubblegum nature of Build", or is it DN3D particularly?

Urban Space Cowboy said:
This makes me wonder, how many of these bugs are in Build proper, and how many are the DN3D team's fault? Remember, Build isn't a complete game the way Doom is; it's a 3D engine with some niceties, but when Ken Silverman licensed it commercially it was as a binary library to link and build upon. That's why each Build game has its own features, like DN3D's scripting, Shadow Warrior's ceiling/floor portals, or Blood's doomfy data encryption.

I've watched speed-runs of Shadow Warrior (both the original game and the Redux re-release and, while there're some hilarious shortcuts (mostly involving jumping on top of enemies!), it's nowhere near as much of a clipping-glitchfest as LLCoolDave's DN3D run. Is it really "the bubblegum nature of Build", or is it DN3D particularly?

It's Duke Nukem 3D in particular; back when I was recording my runs, I thought about the very same thing, so I tried -unsuccessfully- to reproduce the glitches I was using for Duke3D in other Build games (Blood and Shadow Warrior, specifically)

I had no idea the build engine is so heavily modified from game to game. I guess we'll never see a do-all source port like ZDoom for the build games. That's a little disappointing because even without the source code Strife runs perfectly on ZDoom. We'll never see that with Blood, I guess.

Perfectly well enough, but not perfectly. There are a lot of deliberate changes and some omissions that may be accidental, and a few that are just, well I don't want to say lazy, but, without a good explanation that I can think of. The best example would be the fact that in Training skill, monsters do not slow down as they're supposed to do.

Chocolate Strife on the other hand is perfect. Still waiting for anybody to report on a flaw in it for me to fix, cuz I'd love to have any excuse to work on it again.